An award-winning writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007) was a celebrated Polish journalist and author. Praised for the lengths to which he would go to get a story, Kapuscinski gained an extraordinary knowledge of the major global events of the second half of the twentieth century and shared it with his diverse audience. The first posthumous monograph on the writer's life and work, Ryszard Kapuscinski confronts the mixed reception of Kapuscinski's tendency to merge the conventions of reportage with the artistry of literature. Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziatek discuss the writer's accounts of the decolonization of Africa and his work in Asia and South America between 1956 and 1981, a period during which Kapuscinski reported on twenty-seven revolutions and coups. They argue that the journalistic tradition is not in conflict with Kapuscinski's meditations on the deep meanings of these events, and that his first-person involvement in his text was not an indulgence detracting from his journalistic adventures but a well-thought-out conception of eyewitness testimony, developing the moral and philosophical message of the stories. Exploring the whole of Kapuscinski's achievements, Nowacka and Ziatek identify a constant tension between a strictly journalistic position and what in Poland is called literary reportage, located on the border between journalism and artistic prose. Kapuscinski's desire and dedication to make more of journalistic writing is the driving force behind the excellence and readability that have made his legendary books so controversial - and so widely celebrated.

This book is an attempt to diagnose the condition of (post-)modern comparative literature and to formulate its role in the media society in a multicultural world. Andrzej Hejmej reviews the current situation of an "indiscipline" in the widest possible perspective, taking into account both the first concepts from the nineteenth century, including proposals from the French comparative literary scholars, Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, and the institutional work of H. Von Meltzl, as well as the latest concepts from the comparative literary scholars from Western Europe and the U.S. The history of the formation of the main trends of comparative literary studies is explained through the use of metaphors: the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center, and the Tower of Babel. Tackling a variety of proposals from comparative literature scholars as well as proposals from researchers into intermedial and intercultural phenomena leads us to a new look at comparative literature and comparative literary studies. As a result, Hejmej understands modern comparative literature not so much as a further extension of the institutional dimension but more as an interpretative practice embedded in everyday life. This intercultural perspective opens new horizons for comparative literary studies in the twenty-first century.

This book is an attempt at a new interpretation of Stravinsky’s thoughts about music and art, an interpretation made in dialogue with the philosophy of new music and 19th-century artistic ideas. It is also a proposal for a new method of analysing the construction of his musical masterpieces (for example a proposal of new formal sound-units: partons with perceptual invariance), a method in-spired by research into cognitive psychology. Furthermore, in the analysis of Stravinsky’s music, the author emphasises its connection with the Eastern and Western traditions of European culture and links with Plato’s triad of values.

The book presents the history of the only strictly scientific Polish musicological periodical Kwartalnik Muzyczny. It shows how the editorial board of the periodi-cal met with true approval and harsh criticism. The subject allows the author to present the beginnings of Polish musicology and its evolution through three epochs: the late partitioning period, the interwar period of Poland's independ-ence, and the early years after the Second World War

This book represents an attempt to capture different links between modern literature and music. The author examines strict intertextual correlations, the phenomena of musicality and musicality of literary works, the musical structure in literature, so-called musical literary texts. He focuses on the novel Le Coeur absolu by Philippe Sollers, the poem Todesfuge by Paul Celan, the Preludio e Fughe by Umberto Saba and the drama Judasz z Kariothu [Judas Iscariot] by Karol Hubert Rostworowski. The analysis also includes Stanislaw Baranczak's cycle of poems Podroz zimowa: Wiersze do muzyki Franza Schuberta [Winter Journey: Poems to the Music of Franz Schubert] and a fragment of Scene from Herodiade by Stephane Mallarme in Paul Hindemith's composition "Herodiade" de Stephane Mallarme.